Same here - and I check the folder once in a while before purging it. It is no great chore since I get less than one spam mail a day. There used to be much more spam, but after the recent botnet slayings, it has really dropped.

Because of gmail's retarded way of handling '.' in the username (i.e it really doesn't) I get 60+ spams / day because of idiots who can't type their address properly and end up 'colliding' with mine.

I've gotten medical details from family members trying to send to other family members, one business lady in europe who was pretty upset she wasn't getting shipments because she sent mail to me instead of the proper person (i just watched the world burn from my side -- she just kept asking for status updates and

I am not the AC you replied to, but I have tried being friendly and letting people know that they sent to the wrong address.

No good deed goes unpunished. The responses tend to be abusive, threatening or both, blaming the recipient for both obtaining the mail, reading some of it, and the capital offense of implying that the sender might have made a mistake.

If they're stupid enough to send e-mail to the wrong address, the risk is that they're also stupid enough to think that you were the one who caused the problem.

Yeah I have gotten some pretty abusive responses too for attempting to point out someone elses mistake. I suspect they think I have somehow hijacked the email address they wanted to send to, rather than that they have made any mistake themselves.

I have no understanding for the OP's stance not to reply to those *clearly* using a wring mail address, nor do I understand your explanation.

I happen to have an mail-alias using my middle name, a name that around here could also be a family name and many mail clients will automagically complete a simple name in the Send to: bar with their domain name, that way every year I have received a couple of rather private or confidential messages (lawyer and investor stuff) obviously mend for another.

I had that happen at work, where they use the firstname.lastname@company.com format. There was a guy on the other side of the world with the same name as me, so every now and then I'll get technical questions for him about stuff I know nothing about. I forward it on to him with a bit of banter "I can't help her with her problem, can you go talk to her for me?" He seems pretty cool.

Because it would take literally less than a minute and any decent human being would do so. Most indecent human beings would also do so simply because they do not want to be spammed with multiple emails per day about some other person's private business.

Yeah, I hate it when they do that and especially if you can't turn it off. I only get a few spam mails a day, so spam really isn't a problem for me, but nevertheless:- gmail has a spam filter you can't turn off (so I stopped using it)- iCloud now also has a spam filter you can't turn off, and even worse, some of the "spam" is even deleted immediately without sending it to the spam folder! So e-mails are getting lost, I have no way of even knowing this happened, and neither does the sender.

I've found Gmail's "not spam" reporting flag to work incredibly well. Never have I had the same email source marked as spam twice after I've told it that it wasn't. That alone makes me only use Gmail as my email provider. Why? Because *all* free email has built-in spam detection, most of whom have horrible learning algorithms. As far as I can tell, most ISPs that provide website access to email pre-check email for spam, too, even if you've never used the website and rely solely on SMTP. And there's no way t

Oh yes that is what I meant when chose once a week I check the results. WHy would anyone check the filters themselves ever, unless they where having bizarre problems.
I think this poll, was written poorly and they meant to write what I thought they where asking.

*facepalm* gmail isn't the only spam filter in existence. Any email server requires spam filters in this day and age, I remember having to go into mxlogic up to 3 times a week for various reasons to add to the safelist or tweak rules / limits. I don't think you can check gmail filters, unless you work there. Agreed on the writing of the pole, there's two very distinct filter scenarios: business & personal.

Once in a while when I see the count on the Spam folder in the hundreds, i'll check the first page or two of filtered emails to see what is getting flagged. Sometimes I find emails from companies I do business with getting flagged since those companies also send advertisements thinly veiled as newsletters. The big annoyance for me are companies that send emails from different domains than their official company domain. It makes it really hard to tell if it is legit email or a phishing scam.

My option is/why/ and not how often so I picked Rarely. I only check it when I expect email that doesn't show up in my Inbox. Happens now and then that I need to reset a password or sign up to a new site that Google mail may not trust or something. If the confirmation email doesn't show up in the inbox in a reasonable amount of time I'll check the Spam folder. Sometimes it's there and I make a rule. Sometimes the site is just slow to email me. Either way, the look at what the spam filter caught is usually amusing.

Similar here. The "checking" I do is looking at the mail server's logs if I expect a mail from someone new, a new business contact, for example. So a check is nothing more than:
$ grep upstart.com/var/log/mail*.log

I get so little spam anyway (which really surprises me, there must be filters out there that I don't know about).

I have two very old Yahoo email address that I just check sometimes. These get the most spam, about three or four messages a month each. I suspect that Yahoo must be filtering and deleting before I even see the email. Suspected spam then turns up on my computer and gets filtered by my local spam filter. It works 90% of the time.My main personal address just doesn't get spam. I suspect that is bec

For a while, I've been forwarding the contents of one spam email to the the return address of other spam emailers (with the original spammer's email address included of course). Easy, fun and slows them down that much more.

Oh, give me some credit. The only email addresses they get are the other spammers and mine. Anywho, you'd be surprise at how rapidly this cuts down responses and they start auto-responding to each other and realize what's happening. Give it a whirl. Or you could try something a bit more creative by asking the spammers to do some that "creates trust" like these guys...http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YM5QMKLjjm8

You are confusing spammers and scammers. A scam is useless if they can't get a reply to the scam and hence either the address has the scammer on it or they have included an address they can be contacted on, it would be pointless for a scammer to do otherwise.

The statement you made is specific to non-419 scams. 419 scams are conducted via email rather than websites, as with most other spam, so they have to have valid reply-to addresses or they are ineffective.

No, I've seen 419 scam along the line of "To maintain secrecy, I have been forced to send this using a friend's email account, please reply to me at fubar@example.com." That address, of course, having no relation to anything in the headers.

My original point stands - by forwarding any spam, the OP is contributing to the problem. His statement, not specific to 419 scams, was

I've been forwarding the contents of one spam email to the the return address of other spam emailers (with the original spammer's email

He said sending along the adress of another scammer, not sending along the email headers. If you assume he meant that he sends along the message as from the fubar address, then he's right and you are wrong, and you are the only one that is confused on that point.

Someone please mod parent up as informative. Only a truly incompetent spammer would allow a genuine (i.e., belonging to the spammer) reply-to or from address to find its way into the headers. Anyone who forwards to a spammer any address taken from a spam message header is truly adding to the problem.

Having read hundreds of 419 scam emails, I can assure you that they do NOT link to a website, despite what you may thing defines a competent spammer. Remember these are con men, not advertisers. They want to conduct a long, drawn-out interaction with a sucker.
They most often use AOL or Yahoo addresses, and sometimes Hotmail.
When the reply-to is different from the email given in the body, it's different by a minor change such as the number after the name in the recipient field.

Same here. I use the fact that SpamAssassin gives more than a pass/fail score to filter spam into two folders: the 'I'm absolutely sure this is spam' folder, and the 'I've set the sensitivity fairly high, so this might be real email' folder. I scan the second one every day, just to check up on things. Usually months go by without it catching anything wrong, but occasionally bulk email I've requested - from a mailing list or similar (or my dad's emails, I'm not sure why) end up in there. I take it out an

My personal spam filtering is through gmail's filtering, and pretty much the only time I check the spam folder is when I don't get an email I'm expecting. The last couple of times I've checked, I have seen some legitimate email in there, but it's all automated daily emails from companies I have accounts with and the like - it's still never actually caught anything important to me.

In my former job, however, one of my responsibilities was running the spam filtering system where I worked. It was a state ag

. . . some were user false positives (sorry, the mailing list you signed up for isn't spam - if you don't want to get mail from it any more, unsubscribe)

In general the unsubscribe process for most mail lists that one has voluntarily signed up for has improved. Usually, there's a link in the email to an unsubscribe page that requires no more than one or two clicks and you're done -- no more mail within a few hours to a couple days. Some want you to rekey your email address -- that's a little more of a hassle but not that bad unless I'm reading mail on a mobile device and have to come back later.

. . . some were user false positives (sorry, the mailing list you signed up for isn't spam - if you don't want to get mail from it any more, unsubscribe)

In general the unsubscribe process for most mail lists that one has voluntarily signed up for has improved. Usually, there's a link in the email to an unsubscribe page that requires no more than one or two clicks and you're done -- no more mail within a few hours to a couple days. Some want you to rekey your email address -- that's a little more of a hassle but not that bad unless I'm reading mail on a mobile device and have to come back later.

Maybe I should have expanded on that, but my post was getting a bit lengthy already.... When something looked like it could be a legitimate mailing list, I usually checked to see if there was an unsubscribe link or email, and, if so, how it worked. Part of this was niceness on my part; another part was protecting our users - because with 4000 of them, there were definitely some out there who were not smart enough to figure out things like "this supposed unsubscribe link actually goes to a different site,

Been working well for a decade. The neat thing is that 90% of the stuff that needs to be rejected can be done without any spam analysis at all. I only call my spamassassin checks *AFTER* vetting things through MimeDefang. Why waste the CPU cycles? RBLs, Pretending to be from my domain, mail to system accounts, invalid HELO (not FQDN or IP address - single words are very popular with spammers/botnets), RFC1918 HELO addresses, etc. After that, they then go through my spamassassin process, which has been collecting bayes data for several years. The community provided spamassassin rules are kept up to date, and I have a Nagios process that also ensures they are up to date (check_sa-update on nagios exchange. Written by yours truly).

I'd put my system, based on MimeDefang, Spamassassin, clam, etc against barracuda any day. I bet I have a lot less false positives (0 the past year, 1 every couple of months while tuning at my last company), and use a whole lot less CPU by discarding obvious garbage that doesn't need to be processed by spamassassin.

The most recent thing is the "Hello" stuff from legitimate mail accounts. The spammers are using active exploits the past few years to slip through filters, but they still don't get in. I should relabel my spam folder to "Friends with compromised accounts" Everything else scores off the charts and is discarded.

That's almost a third cut out with extremely lightweight checks (that is, excluding the greylisting and RBLs). And nearly two-thirds cut out with a couple RBLs and greylisting. All together these resource-inexpensive checks total... well... over 100% if you add up the rounded values.;)

My actual spam rate for this month, after all these lightweight protections is 9 spam v. 1636 ham, or a failure rate of

Oh, those numbers were for all the messages that went through the server nicely. About 40% of all connections were "aborted" (disconnected) rather than hit these anti-spam measures. (Rejected unauthorized SMTP pipelining, another extremely cheap check, was responsible for most of these aborts.)

I never liked the idea of the Bayesian spam filtering that is most popular with big e-mail providers. I figure, as a software engineer, I have e-mail conversations about spam that might be caught by the filters. And in the meantime, the spammers are including paragraphs of text out of The Hobbit in their messages. Yeah, I know the spam filtering tech has gotten a lot more accurate over the years. But...

Years ago, I decided to do it myself. I set up my own e-mail server and built custom filters. I look for c

re I check the Gmail spam folder daily - :>)
Yeah, I made the same mistake in reading the poll because it's a poorly worded poll question: Spam Filters vs. Spam Folders
It may also be breaking the validity of the poll results (as if the poll results have so much validity here anyway;>p ) since maybe half of the answers are from people who read the question as spam filters which do NOT need to be reread every day, and maybe half of the answers are from people who read the question as spam folders wh

I have an email forwarding alias and an email service, both provide spam filtering, and I don't think I'm missing anything important. If a questionable message is caught by the alias provider, the sender gets a reply asking them to prove their humanity -- this is the provider's feature, not my idea, BTW.

My wife, on the other hand, still uses hotmail, and she gets a lot of false positives so she has to check her "spam folder" frequently. Maybe she's misconfigured something on her end. I don't know, and it's

I never double-check my filters, but I do add to them on a weekly basis. I figure the rules I created are doing their work quite well considering I never get false positives. But sometimes they don't work well enough, so I add more filters every week to cut out the growing amount of junk in cyberspace that accidentally lands in my inbox.

I have spam filters, but they're set not to delete spam mail I receive; rather, they just tag it as spam in the subject line and let me choose whether or not to read the mail. So I guess I check the caught spam every time I check my email.

On the other hand, I don' t think I ever check for messages deleted by my Usenet killfile. Spam is one thing, but trolls are another.

Every sender gets a unique email address, and whenever spam might come through, all I need to do is disable that single address. Haven't needed to do this for months:: Haven't gotten any spam in months..

I put everything that isn't whitelisted by being from people in my address book in a folder labeled "spam".If something shows up in there I usually notice it right away and either delete it or add the sender to my address book.Some especially persistent senders get extra special treatment by being added to a "mark as read and delete" filter.

The greatest invention since the Internet, Google Voice, also has a spam filter. That thing was catching calls left and right during election season. Thank you Google Voice for sparing me from that nonsense.

Our spam filter sends out a daily summary of the quarantine, which I skim for false positives (rare, but they do happen). Unfortunately, we're moving to google, and I do have to check it daily, as it frequently has false positives and it doesn't seem to learn...

The current result (7%) is higher than noise or pranks would indicate, so there are a lot of you out there apparently using no spam filter. How do you do that? Between my two primary email addresses I get 1 spam email every 5 minutes, which outweighs valid email 10:1. (These email addresses are reasonably closely guarded, but have existed for a total of 27 years, so they're out there somewhere.) My life's too short to spend that much time shoveling shit.

The current result (7%) is higher than noise or pranks would indicate, so there are a lot of you out there apparently using no spam filter. How do you do that? Between my two primary email addresses I get 1 spam email every 5 minutes, which outweighs valid email 10:1. (These email addresses are reasonably closely guarded, but have existed for a total of 27 years, so they're out there somewhere.) My life's too short to spend that much time shoveling shit.

So how do you do it? Do you simply not use email? Is your email address brand new? Do you only use burner accounts? Do you get a thrill from reading or deleting trolling spam? Do you simply not know you have a spam filter?

The vast majority of the email I receive does not pass through a filter. The trick is to control who can find your email address. My personal email address is given only to friends and family. It gets essentially no spam and I have not change the address in 15 years.

Virtually everyone else gets a unique address assigned specifically to them. If I get spam on the address, I deactivate it. Sometimes I create a new address and notify but most of the time, I decide and any organization that leaks my addres

I wish you luck keeping your personal email address spam free. All it takes is one of your trusted family or friends to get a virus and your email address is out there for the harvesting, no way to get it back.

Unfortunately my personal email address goes back to 1993, essentially before spam, and is in tons of archives (usenet especially) so that's that.

Sure, I could create a new personal email address, but there is a certain pride in having the same email address for nearly 20 years.

I wish you luck keeping your personal email address spam free. All it takes is one of your trusted family or friends to get a virus and your email address is out there for the harvesting, no way to get it back.

Unfortunately my personal email address goes back to 1993, essentially before spam, and is in tons of archives (usenet especially) so that's that.

Sure, I could create a new personal email address, but there is a certain pride in having the same email address for nearly 20 years.

Actually, the virus scenario has already happened, multiple times. I get a few spams while the virus is active but, so far, none of the viruses have harvested my address into a persistent database. It has been 15 years. I shutdown my 1994 address in 1997, forwarding only originators who had sent me legitimate mail in the past year. I should probably shut down the forward. It has probably been a decade since any legitimate mail was sent there and the filter occasionally (bug) passes along spam.

Forget it, we nearly all have acquaintances with a Hotmail account and one day it will be 0wned and all their contacts show up in spam lists.
I have some mail addresses registered that have never been used and yet they receive spam.
The nice observation is that addresses (partially) made up from random strings are hardly ever spammed.

On my own domain, I have SpamAssassin configured well enough that I simply have it delete anything flagged as spam. Either it's in my inbox, or it's gone. I do tend to err on the safe side as far as what it tags though. In all the years I've been doing this, I've had one complaint from a family member about a possible missed confirmation message from an online signup. However, I submitted one myself, and the mail was received right away, so I think it was just a fluke that the email didn't get delivered

If checking my spam filter includes checking my spambox, then I check it more than once a day. However, if it only includes checking the mail filter logs, then I hardly do this anymore. My spamfilter works so well these days that only the obvious stuff gets rejected outright. If there's any doubt, it ends up in my spambox instead. Getting Exim to work this way isn't straightforward, but it's definitely worth it.

People who really want to see an end to spam need to realize that filtering will never bring about that end. Filtering is only the continuation of a digital arms race with the spammers themselves, with users paying the cost. People who genuinely want to see an end to spam will look for ways to actually prevent spammers from sending spam, as this is the only way for users to stop paying for this costly war.

For those who are new to my saying this, I will repeat that spam is an economic problem and will on

We use the Cisco Ironport - and have done since before Cisco bought them. Quite good devices - but as posted by someone above - 90% of the work is done by reputation filtering and protocol correctness filtering - which can be done using the normal black holes with relatively no cost. If the spam makes it through both of these, then its probably got a 5% chance of making it through the content filtering. I probably get a couple of false negatives a day - and 0 false positives in the last 3 years..

I don't let email pass through my spam folder without eyeballing. Actual spam gets mark read, non-spam gets unjunked. Usually I get between 2000-3000 spam mails per month, 500-600 actual emails (including mailing lists and crud), perhaps 10 false negatives and 5 false positives. That's a pretty good ratio, but the five might be important so I still have to scan through the 3000. It's less work than it sounds like, particularly since it's enough to do it about every two weeks.

I have sendmail or some other MTA installed on my work computer (a Linux box) so that it can send me email notifications upon completion of scripts and batch jobs.

These emails REGULARLY get marked as spam by gmail, no matter how many times I tell it that it's not spam. I think it might have more to do with the originating IP. I know that DNSBLs like spamhaus block certain IP ranges because it believes there shouldn't be any email servers in that range.

I have sendmail or some other MTA installed on my work computer (a Linux box) so that it can send me email notifications upon completion of scripts and batch jobs.

These emails REGULARLY get marked as spam by gmail, no matter how many times I tell it that it's not spam. I think it might have more to do with the originating IP. I know that DNSBLs like spamhaus block certain IP ranges because it believes there shouldn't be any email servers in that range.

Yes, this happens. The thing to do is verify and the problem.with of the multi rbl checkers [anti-abuse.org] and then follow procedure to get your address removed from the list. My personal server is in a static IP range but it still ends up on one of the dynamic IP block lists every now and then. Some of the lists are now blocking end user static IP's too, by default, so it isn't necessarily an error: just over-zealous policy.